Breathe…as if your life depended upon it.

BREATHE. Sixty Seconds of deep, slow belly breathing. At the top of every hour. Only in the eye of the storm can you make a solid, centered, calm evaluation. And this is critical. Critical. You are going to need to step out of the crisis, step out of the political tug of war, and make a sober decision about who is or is not trustworthy. This is no longer a game, if ever it was.

Pause. Close your eyes. Imagine a future, five years from now. Ask yourself what course of action leads to life and happiness for you, your children, your parents, our country. What is a long-term choice, what is a short-term choice.

There is a story about an experiment. In it, children are offered a cookie, and told that the adult monitor is leaving the room. Will return in ten minutes. If they can refrain from eating the cookie, they will receive a second cookie. In ten minutes the adult returns, and most of the kids had eaten their cookies…but a few had not. Those few were followed through the rest of their school experience, out into their careers. And the kids who were able to wait, as difficult as it might have been, got better grades, higher degrees, and later, more successful careers than those who gobbled their cookies down.

Yes, this is hard. But the people suggesting our country will fall apart from a few months of quarantine have the obligation to show us, historically, where that happened. We CAN show you cultures that died due to unchecked disease. Ask the sprawling Native American nations wiped out…